


Dreaming of Death Yet to Come

by sparxwrites



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreams, Gen, Nightmares, Resurrection, Stull Cemetary, Trueform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-29
Updated: 2014-01-29
Packaged: 2018-01-10 12:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam dreams of Stull cemetery every night for three weeks.</p>
<p>It claws its way inside his dreams like a fresh wound – not like it happened nearly four years ago, not like it was only the beginning of something much, much worse, like it’s something new and ragged, some horror he’s only just beginning to comprehend.</p>
<p>(Sam has dreams. They're a lot more than just dreams.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreaming of Death Yet to Come

Sam dreams of Stull cemetery every night for three weeks.

It claws its way inside his dreams like a fresh wound – not like it happened nearly four years ago, not like it was only the beginning of something much, much worse, like it’s something new and ragged, some horror he’s only just beginning to comprehend.

He dreams of hands pushing their way up through the earth, shrivelled and pale and trembling. He dreams of a weight on his chest, crushing and terrifying, spilling inside his mouth like damp earth. He dreams of a white light rolling across the scrubby grass, eating gravestones and trees and swallowing everything whole.

When he wakes, it’s with a gasp, the sheets sticking to him cold-sweat and uncomfortable.

This goes on for three weeks.

They’re never quite the same, the dreams, variations on the theme of death and rebirth and being buried and being  _terrified_  but each one charmingly unique – like copies of some famous painting, each one with their little quirks and imperfections. He would be flattered by the effort his mind’s obviously putting into them if it weren’t for the sense of  _urgency_  that comes with them, the sense that time is running out.

The sense, maybe, that time  _has_  run out, and he’s playing catch-up.

-

It’s at the end of the third week – when he wakes from screaming and flames even as the earth presses in on him from all sides, when he comes to clawing at the air like he’s trying to dig his way to freedom – that he breaks.

He’s in the Impala before he knows what’s going on, dressed only in the white shirt and dark grey pants he sleeps in, too thin and too little in the cold air that’s settled in the car since the last time it was used. He doesn’t even have shoes on, just a pair of thick socks that are falling off his feet, the heels on the balls of his toes.

Dean’s going to kill him for this in the morning, he knows, and he can’t bring himself to care.

The Impala starts up easily, loud in the quiet of the night, headlights flaring on and filling the dark. Sam reaches out, strokes a hand across the familiar surface of the dashboard, feeling the dips and ridges of it like a comfort blanket. The dream still looms in his mind, crushing and heavy and somehow urgent, but the Impala makes it better.

Sam places one socked foot on the accelerator, the other on the clutch, and drives.

-

By the time he stops, switches off the engine and settles back against the leather of the seat, it’s dawn. The sun’s beginning to rise, weak and watery through the window, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive, that he’s not crashed into anything.

He’s here, though.

The wrought-iron gates of the cemetery rise up before him, and they’re not as intimidating in the encroaching dawn, when he can see the disarray of the gravestones and trees beyond, the way nature is slowly reclaiming this space that no one seems to be tending to. He touches one of them, slowly, fingers running down the length of the bar in something approaching reverence or sadness, before he pushes them open and steps through.

His socks are soaked through before he’s taken five steps, dew seeping cols and heavy through them, but he barely notices it, doesn’t mind. It’s not a particularly cold morning, after all.

The cemetery isn’t foggy, really, not dark or rustling or any of the things one might see in a horror movie – but still the sense a sense of claustrophobia, of weight, of time running out presses into him, heavy and sickening and rising up in his throat like bile. When his legs try to buckle underneath him, he lets them, drops into a sitting position and braces his hands on his knees, drawing in a deep breath.

It’s clean and fresh and cool, but does nothing to clear the pressure bearing down on his throat.

-

The hands appear first.

It’s an hour past sunrise and he’s been sat in the grass for nearly that long, dew soaking through his pants, but he can’t bring himself to care. It’s cold, even with his socks on, but he can’t bring himself to care about that either.

When he sees the hands – first one, then the other, pale and dirt-stained, tips bloody and fingernails ragged – he laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs, doubled over with his head in his hands and tears running wet and cold down his cheeks because trust him to have dreams inside of dreams, trust his head to be this level of fucked up.

The hands have turned into a head and a torso and arms when he next looks up, sprawled across the ground and gasping hard and clawing weakly at the sparse grass, and he stops laughing.

“Lucifer,” wheezes the thing pulling itself out the ground – a corpse or a human or an archangel, or a figment of his own mutilated mind, he’s not quite sure – staring at him with wide, childish eyes. “Lucifer, brother, please. Help.”

Archangel, then.

The words have an edge of screaming to them, a rawness and a breathlessness and a hint of chimes, and it takes Sam a moment to realise he’s hearing Michael’s true voice through the mouth of his half-brother. He doesn’t know, can’t know, why his ears aren’t bleeding and his eardrums breaking, but he fancies he feels the demon blood surge thick and hot through his veins and he feels a little sick.

“Not… not Lucifer,” he manages, eventually, wiping his hands off on his knees and standing slowly, carefully, as if the archangel in front of him is an injured deer, easily spooked. “I’m not him.”

Far from being reassuring, Sam’s words seem to send Michael into a frenzy. He braces his hands against the grass again – doesn’t ask for help, doesn’t ask for anything from Sam – and both pushes and pulls, heaving and straining against the earth that is slowly disgorging his body.

“Lucifer!” he calls, and the edge of screaming gets louder, the chimes sharper and hotter, even as something bright and painful to look at unfurls from his back. “Lucifer, brother!” They beat at the air, silent and sending out waves of pressure that hurt Sam’s ears with their noiseless solidity, even as the apparitions fracture and shed.

Flakes of light fall to the ground with every motion, fading and dying, and Sam watches as an archangel already in the process of Falling is birthed from the damp, heavy ground.

-

They find the thing an hour later. Sam says  _thing_ , because he’s not sure what it is – Michael tells him it’s Lucifer, reaches out to try and touch it and cradle it even as it recoils from him, but Sam doesn’t think it could possibly be an archangel, much less the Lightbringer. For all his faults, all his evil, Lucifer was – is – bright and pure and  _perfect_ , like burnished silver and the concentrated heart of a star under Sam’s skin.

This thing, though, is ragged-edged and broken, cracked along fault lines and leaking white lightning from its scaled-feathered-furred-smooth, oozing skin. Its limbs are too long, distorted, somehow both spindly and bulging, what serves for its fingers and toes long and claw-like. Its face…

Sam’s not sure what its face is. It looks like a cat, a bird, a gazelle, shifting strangely when he stares and making his brain struggle to process it all.

He tries not to stare.

The thing makes a noise like breaking stones, like avalanches, like the noise a forest would make if every living creature in it raised their voices in unholy union. It  _screams_ , voicelessly and wordlessly, and tries to drag itself away from the hole it was born from, hide itself a little further behind a nearby gravestone, as if that would do any good.

One leg is still stuck inside the hole, though, tangled in place by thick roots around its claws, and it pulls and pulls to no avail, plant pressing tight enough to crack open the black, glossy skin to show the light that pulses underneath.

“Here,” says Sam, despite his fear, despite his roiling stomach and the knowledge that his  _yes_  still stands, that Lucifer could still crawl back inside his chest and sleep within his ribcage, hollow him out. “Here, let me-”

He steps forward, ignores the way the thing twitches like it wants to pull away, wants to crawl closer and press up against him, untangles the roots around its leg and watches it scramble backwards with fitful, ungainly movements.

What Sam assumes are its wings are shattered, mangled and blackened with rot and trailing limply along the ground behind it. They shed shards of blackened Grace with every twitch, feathers sloughing off like honey and sinking into the ground until only the bones remain.

“ _Sam_ ,” it whispers, and the aching, terrified love in its voice is what finally tells Sam it’s him, it’s really him. “ _Sam. Sam_.”


End file.
